Zima

Michael announces his plans to come home after a long mysterious absence. The people whom he had left behind decide to organise a small get-together for his return. Despite his promise, Michael stays away yet he remains strangely omnipresent, just like the fears that he may never return. „Zima” opens as a sort of awakening from winter’s sleep. For the characters to emerge in all their brightness and intensity they must long for a home. It is a place onto which their deepest wishes, things from their inner space, are being projected. The setting is the home of a 77-year-old artist, Mary Bauermeister, former wife of Karlheinz Stockhausen and well-known host of Fluxus happenings— collaborations with John Cage, Nam June Paik and other avant-garde artists, poets and composers—in her Cologne studio during the 1960s. In order to preserve the spirit of this extraordinary place we did not use any artificial lighting and did not move or remove anything from the house. The only things we brought were ourselves, a small team consisting of director, cinematographer, sound crew and actors. Moreover, we decided to use the sound of Mary’s home as the primary source of all sound in the film. Apart from the piano piece, „Difficult To Say How Long,” composed by Juan María Solare, all of the music in the film was improvised. (Katarina Stankovic)